The lessons derived from life’s experiences can sometimes come to us by literary or musical metaphors. William Shakespeare’s The Tempest tells us that the past is prologue, which means simply that history provides the context for the present. The past sets up what will follow and may help us predict what will happen in the future. Moving on to the musical metaphor, a prelude is a musical term that refers to an introductory theme.
In 2016, Donald Trump became the 45th President of the United States by winning the election in the electoral college. The “consolation prize,” of course, was that Hillary Clinton could at least assert that she had won the popular vote, a defensible claim that could lead to revising the presidential election system. But Trump was insistent that he had equally won the popular votes totals as well as having won in the electoral college. He reached this conclusion by asserting that, as a matter of fact, millions of “illegal aliens” voted unlawfully and this was the only reasons he had apparently lost the popular note. There is a single great difficulty with this assertion: it is plainly untrue. It is widely agreed that there is not a carefully constructed system installed to ensure that only the lawfully entitled ever engage in voting; the system we have is not set up to closely monitor the identity of voter registrants, so there is a real possibility that some have voted unlawfully. But my research has not found a single commentator who thought that there is any reason to believe that millions had voted unlawfully in 2016. The simple conclusion is straightforward: the claim of millions of unlawful voters was a lie. (Writing a timely post that year, I suggested that Trump’s claim was not offered in good faith—a bit more delicate way to say the same basic thing.)
That was several years ago, and I have never seen a serious analysis coming out the other way. Compare President Trump’s claim, as we approached the 2020 election, that his landslide victory was about to be stolen by the “leftist” Democrats. The potential for a “rigged” election became a Trumpian theme early in the election cycle. The polls showed that Trump was running behind Biden. For Trump, what we received initially were words of warning. The risk was that mail-in ballots would present vote-counting problems, and could lead to a late vote counting operation and greater potential for disputes over identifying and counting the votes. As the election was completed, the insistence of the Trump campaign was that the election had been plagued by fraud, so much that a fair reconstruction could turn the results completely around, Yet one of the President’s most committed and supportive officials, Attorney General William Barr concluded that the evidence did not show that there had been sufficient fraud that it could have been decisive.
It is well known that the President continued to claim that the election had been rigged, for weeks after to vote counting was completed. The Trump campaign claimed that the election had been plagued by fraud, sufficiently to turn the result on its head. The election was litigated repeatedly in November, with the total coming to more than 60 lawsuits. The Trump litigation team lost as to the significant issues raised in every case. However one evaluates the fraud claims, there is not a reason to believe that the Democrats, or the Biden campaign “stole” the election outcome. So Trump’s more recent claims track with the obviously untrue claim as to the upi
This analysis is important mainly because it is powerfully reminiscent of what historically was called the “big lie,” which referred to Nazi claim that the Jews led a global conspiracy responsible for many of Germany’s (and the world’s) woes. This big lie helped pave the way to the Holocaust. There are understandable fears of what is called reductio ad Hitlerum—the human tendency to compare anything one is against to events in Nazi Germany.
But the fears of Trump’s thinking leading us down the road toward fascism is not novel or strange. A Yale University, Timothy Snyder, wrote books on Hitler, Stalin, the Holocaust, and tyranny. Snyder concludes that the analogy to the “big lie” is not preposterous at all. “There are lies that, if you believe them, rearrange everything,” he says. If you doubt his idea, consider the effect of the fury produced by the conviction of Trump fans that the election was stolen from him. The events of January 6 illustrate the impact. Snyder contends that in recent history Trump has become “the high priest of the big lie.” One consequence is we have arrived at a period that virtually “post truth.” Snyder contends that “post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president.”
Snyder contends that “when you take away facts, you’re opening the for something else.” You thereby open the way for one to say, “I am the truth. I am your voice.’ Those words have been said by Mr. Trump, and they are on the path to fascism. Snyder concludes that “the three-word chants, the idea that the press are the enemy of the people,” are “fascist concepts.” He does not conclude that Trump is a fascist. Instead, he suggests that this is a potential place we might enter in the future. He concludes: “Imagine if the big lie continues. Imagine if there’s someone more skillful in using it than he is. If that happens, “we’re starting to move into clearly fascist territory.”
Legal&Political 